High Culture as Subculture : Brisbane's Contemporary Chamber Music Scene

The aim of the dissertation is to discover the extent to which methodologies and conceptual frameworks used to understand popular culture may also be useful in the attempt to understand contemporary high culture. The dissertation addresses this question through the application of subculture theory to Brisbane’s contemporary chamber music scene, drawing on a detailed case study of the contemporary chamber ensemble Topology and its audiences. The dissertation begins by establishing the logic and necessity of applying cultural studies methodologies to contemporary high culture. This argument is supported by a discussion of the conceptual relationships between cultural studies, high culture, and popular culture, and the methodological consequences of these relationships. In Chapter 2, a brief overview of interdisciplinary approaches to music reveals the central importance of subculture theory, and a detailed survey of the history of cultural studies research into music subcultures follows. Five investigative themes are identified as being crucial to all forms of contemporary subculture theory: the symbolic; the spatial; the social; the temporal; the ideological and political. Chapters 3 and 4 present the findings of the case study as they relate to these five investigative themes of contemporary subculture theory. Chapter 5 synthesises the findings of the previous two chapters, and argues that while participation in contemporary chamber music is not as intense or pervasive as is the case with the most researched street-based youth subcultures, it is nevertheless possible to describe Brisbane’s contemporary chamber music scene as a subculture. The dissertation closes by reflecting on the ways in which the subcultural analysis of contemporary chamber music has yielded some insight into the lived practices of high culture in contemporary urban contexts.

Re-assessing streetkids : a critique of subculture theory

Focusing on the notion of street kids, the paper suggests that youth be viewed in an alternative way to the subculture theory associated with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham (CCCS). It is argued that not only is subculture theory an unsuitable mechanism for understanding homeless youth but also, and more importantly, is itself fundamentally problematic. It is suggested that the work of Michel Foucault necessitates a reevaluation of the domain assumptions underlying subculture theory and offers in its place a model that relocates street kids, and youth itself, as artifacts of a network of governmental strategies.

Between flagged borders, across gendered lands : the voiceless female space in contemporary representations of Australian beach

International and national representations of the beach perpetuate normative female concepts by maintaining dominant masculine myths, such as that of the heroic lifesaver and tanned sunbaker. Female experiences on the beach are traditionally associated with rhetorics of danger and peril, contrasted to the welcomed and protective gaze of the beach male. Conventional understandings of the gaze promote male surveillance of women, and although some resistance exists, the beach primarily remains a place to observe the female form. This article attempts to explore currents of resistance at the beach through a self-reflexive examination of Schoolies. Although the event is fixed within patriarchal codes and structures, small eddies of resistance exist amongst female participants in light of increasing awareness of masculine hegemony. The Australian beach remains a contested site of multiple constructs of gender and national identity. This article reveals the changing tides of resistance.

Framing Culture : Criticism and Policy in Australia

How is contemporary culture 'framed' - understood, promoted, dissected and defended - in the new approaches being employed in university education today? How do these approaches compare with those seen in the public policy process? What are the implications of these differences for future directions in theory, education, activism and policy? Framing Culture looks at cultural and media studies, which are rapidly growing fields through which students are introduced to contemporary cultural industries such as television, film and video. It compares these approaches with those used to frame public policy and finds a striking lack of correspondence between them. Issues such as Australian content on commercial television and in advertising, new technologies and new media, and violence in the media all highlight the gap between contemporary cultural theories and the way culture and communications are debated in public policy. The reasons for this gap must be investigated before closer relations can be established. Framing Culture brings together cultural studies and policy studies in a lively and innovative way. It suggests avenues for cultural activism that have been neglected in cultural theory and practice, and it will provoke debates which are long overdue.

Introduction : the global flow of creative ideas

In the era of late modernism, various pressures play a decisive role in shaping the texture and meaning of the world around us. Population, work, transportation, new technologies of information and communication, lifestyle cultures and other forces are increasingly mobile, and this in turn helps make for a new set of public and personal surroundings. Social life everywhere now appears to share more and more in an international (if not a global) order, even if inequality and stratification remain common inside territories and across territories. Still, the perception is that a particular cultural life is increasingly universal. More and more consumers come to share in its practices and products, with those products becoming more and more homogeneous. This standardization argument finds much support in the apparent internationalization of many elements of media, entertainment, leisure and lifestyle cultures, with cultural conglomerates determined to maximize their global market reach. Once upon a time, in order to understand the economic, political and cultural forces affecting citizens and society, it was mostly deemed sufficient to look within the boundaries of the nation-state. Over the past two decades, these same pressures of globalization have impacted on critical research, highlighting the methodological need to adopt an optic that is more cross-border and transcultural as a means of gaining greater understanding of cultural life.

The Evolution of the creative industries : creative clusters, creative citizens and social network markets 創意產業的演化 : 創意集群 ,創意公民, 社會網絡市場 [published in Chinese]

The creative industries are important because they are clustered at the point of attraction for a billion or more young people around the world. They're the drivers of demographic, economic and political change. They start from the individual talent of the creative artist and the individual desire and aspiration of the audience. These are the raw materials for innovation, change and emergent culture, scaled up to form new industries and coordinated into global markets based on social networks.

Orchids : intersex and identity in documentary

Orchids: Intersex and Identity in Documentary explores the creative practice challenges of working with bodies with intersex in the long-form auto/biographical documentary Orchids. Just as creative practice research challenges the dominant hegemony of quantitative and qualitative research, so does my creative work position itself as a nuanced piece, pushing the boundaries of traditional cultural studies theories, documentary film practice and creative practice method, through its distinctive distillation and celebration of a new form of discursive rupturing, the intersex voice.

'When everything old is new again' : class, consumerism and masculinity in Alasdair Duncan's Metro

Alasdair Duncan’s narrative Metro, set in Brisbane in the early twenty-first century, focuses on Liam, an unapologetically self-styled ‘white, upper middle-class brat’ whose sense of place and identity is firmly mapped by spatial and economic co-ordinates. This article considers the linkages between spatiality and identity in Duncan’s narrative, as well as the ways in which traditional, hegemonic (heterosexual) forms of masculinity are re-invigorated in the enactment of an upper-middle-class script of success, privilege and consumerism. It argues that the safeguarding of these hegemonic forms of masculine identity involves strategies of spatial and bodily expression underpinned by conspicuous consumption, relegating other forms of sexual identity to an exploitable periphery

Searching the self in Seoul : trans-youth and urban social networking in Korea

This paper presents a brief analysis of Seoul trans-youth’s search for identity through urban social networking, arguing that technological, socio-cultural and environmental (urban) contexts frame how mobility and ubiquity are (re)created in Seoul. The paper is empirically based on fieldwork conducted in Seoul, South Korea, from 2007 to 2008 as part of a research project on the mobile play culture of Seoul trans-youth(a term that will be explained in detail in the following section). Shared Visual Ethnography (SVE) was used as the research method which involved sharing of visual ethnographic data that were created by the participants. More specifically, the participants were asked to take photos, which were then shared and discussed with other participants and the researcher on the photo-sharing service Flickr. The research also involved a questionnaire and daily activity diaries, as well as interviews. A total of 44 Korean transyouths – including 23 females and 21 males – participated in interviews and photo-sharing. The paper draws specifically on the qualitative data from individual and/or group interviews, the total duration of which was 2–2.5 hours for each participant.

Дизайнът на взаимодействията, масовата комуникация и предизвикателствата на споделеното експертно знание (Interaction Design, Mass Communication And the Challenge of Distributed Expertise)

This paper considers some of the implications of the rise of design as a master-metaphor of the information age. It compares the terms 'interaction design' and 'mass communication', suggesting that both can be seen as a contradiction in terms, inappropriately preserving an industrial-age division between producers and consumers. With the shift from mass media to interactive media, semiotic and political power seems to be shifting too - from media producers to designers. This paper argues that it is important for the new discipline of 'interactive design' not to fall into habits of thought inherited from the 'mass' industrial era. Instead it argues for the significance, for designers and producers alike, of what I call 'distributed expertise' -including social network markets, a DIY-culture, user-led innovation, consumer co-created content, and the use of Web 2.0 affordances for social, scientific and creative purposes as well as for entertainment. It considers the importance of the growth of 'distributed expertise' as part of a new paradigm in the growth of knowledge, which has 'evolved' through a number of phases, from 'abstraction' to 'representation', to 'productivity'. In the context of technologically mediated popular participation in the growth of knowledge and social relationships, the paper argues that design and media-production professions need to cross rather than to maintain the gap between experts and everyone else, enabling all the agents in the system to navigate the shift into the paradigm of mass productivity.

Presentations in English : find your voice as a presenter

With estimates of more than thirty million given each day, presentations have become an integral part of modern society. They can signify the difference between gaining or losing a job, or being successful or unsuccessful at university and a future career. Presentations in English, combining a 128-page book and DVD, is an innovative and complete course aimed specifically at non-native speakers of English.

The Dystopian Mirror and the Female Body

Women’s experience of the change room mirror is not a particularly affirmative one. The pleasure in looking at the self is dissipated by the ideal feminine ‘I’ that hovers in the shadows of their image of self and others constructing dystopian surveillance and entrapment. This article considers the responses of a number of women bloggers who describe their negative experiences in front of change room mirrors. It also argues that the mirror has been used in positive and creative ways by women artists to assert a self that is not subject to a critical gaze.

Embedded engagements : the challenge of creative practice research to the humanities

This article explores the opportunities and challenges surrounding a viable cross-disciplinary engagement between the Humanities disciplines and the Creative Practice disciplines within the innovative context of the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. This will involve a charting of the intersection of the emerging field of creative practice-led research with various disciplines in the Humanities such as cultural studies. The potential for a reciprocal, transformative process in these creative fields will be addressed. Several examples of postgraduate students’ research will be foregrounded as case studies of the issues involved in fostering a genuine cultural critique both within and through creative practice. Some observers may argue that the research higher degree creative practitioner in effect looks outward from the symbolic material forms being created, in search of an interpretative paradigm, thereby trawling the Humanities for a theory. Several current debates within the postgraduate research arena regarding the balance between the theoretical exegesis and the creative work (e.g. performance, drama, dance, visual art, creative writing, film and screen production, music, interactive media etc) will also be critically examined.

Making connections : creative industries networks in outer suburban locations

The role of networks and their contribution to sustaining and developing creative industries is well documented (Wittel 2001; Kong 2005; Pratt 2007). This article argues that although networks operate across geographical boundaries, particularly through the use of communication technologies, the majority of studies have focussed on the ways in which networks operate in a) specific inner-urban metropolitan regions or b) specific industries. Such studies are informed by the geographical mindset of creative city proponents such as Florida (2002) and Landry (2000) in which inner-urban precincts are seen as the prime location for creative industries activity, business development and opportunity. But what of those creative industries situated beyond the inner city? Evidence in Australia suggests there is increasing creative industries activity beyond the inner city, in outer-suburban and ex-urban areas (Gibson & Brennan-Horley 2006). This article identifies characteristics of creative industries networks in outer-suburban locations in Melbourne and Brisbane. It argues that supporting and sustaining creative industries networks in these locations may require different strategies than those applied to inner-city networks. The article thus contributes to the growing understanding of the cultural economic geography of creative industries.